Published 4:00 am, Monday, May 15, 2006

When President Bush visited Silicon Valley last month, he was greeted by protesters, including many Iranian Americans urging the administration to pursue a peaceful path toward their former homeland.

On the same day, Bush met with a group of academics, including Professor Abbas Milani, an Iranian exile and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

In one day, Bush's interactions with local Iranian Americans spanned the frustrations and hopes of many struggling to create a political identity as U.S.-Iran tensions over Iran's nuclear program escalate

Many Iranian Americans say they remain political outsiders. They blame their lack of clout to their own politically shy sensibilities, formed as emigrants from a repressive land. But there are signs of change.

Some Iranian Americans in the Bay Area are running for office. Susan Irene Etezadi is campaigning to be a San Mateo County Superior Court Judge. San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi is also Iranian American. Others have set up a political action committee, and there's a national group trying to get Iranian Americans more involved by teaching them to write letters to the editor and registering them to vote.

"We are witnessing the beginning of an awakening," said Milani. "It has come after a belated recognition that the community's economic, scientific and scholarly success has not yet translated in any way to a commensurate political influence."

Most of the roughly 1 million Iranian Americans in the United States are refugees from the 1979 Iranian revolution. It transformed their homeland from a monarchist dictatorship to an Islamic theocracy.

But the growing tension has triggered fear among Iranian Americans that their apathy has left them unequipped to handle a situation in which global tensions focus on the two countries most dear to them.

"None of us care at all for the Iranian regime," said Arash Aramesh, 22, a senior at UC Berkeley who is also president of the campus chapter of the Iranian Student Alliance in America. "If we did, we wouldn't be here.

"But we ... care for innocent people living in Iran," said Aramesh. Like many Iranian Americans, he still has family -- two brothers -- in Iran which has recently relaxed immigration rules to allowed more travel between the two nations.

Several Iranian American leaders and community members say the initial resistance to politics was driven by reasons common to all immigrant groups: they needed time to get their footing in their new homeland and had to focus on making a living.

Yet many Iranian Americans have been successful, particularly in Silicon Valley. Pierre Omidyar helped found eBay, Omid Kordestani is one of Google's top executives and Farzad Nazem is Yahoo's chief technical officer.

Their political silence comes from a mind-set formed during Iran's monarchist and theocratic regimes, when speaking out could result in jail or worse, they say.

As children, "we were concerned that our own cousins shouldn't hear us talk about politics, said Nafiseh Lindberg, 57. "It was taboo. You were always scared of the secret police, the SAVAK, coming after you."

It wasn't until Bush's visit to San Jose and Stanford -- long after she immigrated -- that Lindberg, a Palo Alto developer, spoke out on a political issue.

"Any threat of war on Iran is emotionally overwhelming to me," she said.

Many Bay Area Iranian Americans said they oppose any military action against Iran and fear it would bolster the current government's nationalist fervor.

Immigrants' groups often politicize in moments of crisis. For Iranian Americans, those crises have multiplied since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Hundreds of Iranian Americans were arrested right after the attacks when most male noncitizens from 18 mostly Arab or Muslim countries who were living in the United States were interviewed and fingerprinted. For others, the indignity of having their grandparents grilled by customs officials when they visit from Iran stands out as the moment of political awakening.

"The community lacked the organizational structures to make their voice heard," said Trita Parsi, president and co-founder of the National Iranian American Council, whose goal is to get Iranian Americans more involved in political discourse, by working with congressional leaders and the media or getting eligible people to register to vote.

For many, the contradiction between the community's wealth and its lack of a political voice was painful.

"Just being rich doesn't make you influential," said Parsi.

Several Iranian Americans have begun using their wealth to sow the seeds of political prominence.

"We have been active at all of these levels and, to me, that's a sign of a community that is politically maturing and a community that is both cognizant of the instruments that are capable of changing opinion and capable of getting those instruments out there," said Milani.

"Right now, it is clear, to the administration that there is a voice out there of the Iranian community. There might not be one voice. But there is a presence."

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